Wartime

During World War II, German bombers regularly flew sorties over the English Channel, targeting factories in London and the midlands. Many were shot down by anti-aircraft defences surrounding the industrial areas, and by fighter planes sent up to harry them, but they kept on coming in wave upon wave. Sometimes in the fog of war they would improvise on their mission, turning back before the onslaught of guns and dropping their payloads instead in rural areas of the southeast of England.

On a dark night in June 1941, one of these premature bombs landed on a detached country villa, collapsing it to rubble and killing the 47-year old owner. A brief dispatch in the newspaper reported only his name, age and occupation – civil servant, along with those of the five injured, rescued from upstairs bedrooms. Each living name and calamity-stamped age told readers of unimagined sorrow, promise and hope. Nothing further was said about the man’s 48-year old wife, who would live on to the age of 99, still driving to the hairdressers once a week in her black Morris Minor; her 23-year old daughter by a previous marriage, who would never give dominion to her paralysis from the blast; her then fiancé, a Royal Navy Lieutenant, who would leave her for spinsterhood to marry an able-bodied woman; the 14-year old girl, who 10 years earlier had lost her mother to cancer, and now her father too, who 17 years later (more than a lifetime away) would become my mother; her 12-year old brother, beloved by her and by family friends (who would act as surrogate parents, and later by a young woman who went on to become a family friend), who delighted in company and could never do anything on his own, who suffered from eczema and apathy, to the point of begging for a leukotomy, which took him in an out of hospitals and psychiatric homes until his death aged 27 from an overdose of prescription medicines, “perhaps accidental” – thought my mother.

In the skies over wartime Germany an allied bomber communicated with its fighter-plane escort1:

… Then I heard the bomber call me in:
“Little Friend, Little Friend,
I got two engines on fire.
Can you see me, Little Friend?”
I said, “I’m crossing right over you.
Let’s go home.”

• Reported by the American poet Randall Jarrell (1945), of a woman visiting her son, remembering what she had read on the front page of her newspaper the week before.

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index